The swampland conjecture and the Higgs expectation value

Understand

The recently proposed de Sitter swampland conjecture excludes local extrema of a scalar potential with a positive energy density in a low energy effective theory.

• Under the conjecture, the observed dark energy cannot be explained by the cosmological constant.
• The local maximum of the Higgs potential at the symmetric point also contradicts with the conjecture.
• In order to make the Standard Model consistent with the conjecture, it has been proposed to introduce a quintessence field, $Q$, which couples to the cosmological constant and the local maximum of the Higgs potential.